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The Novels & Stories of Bernard Malamud (three volumes)

Edited by Philip Davis

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews “Natural magic”: Philip Davis on the unapologetic heart-work of Bernard Malamud
June 7, 2023

Video Small Miracles: The Stories of Bernard Malamud
May 3, 2023

One of America’s great mythmakers, a storyteller who ranks with Flannery O’Connor as an unfolder of the mysteries of human character, Bernard Malamud is a writer of profound sympathy, intensity, and emotional truth. The three volumes of Library of America’s Malamud edition bring together eight novels and 49 stories from the five decades of his extraordinary career.

Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s
Born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) began his career writing stories of unsparing precision and power, plumbing the depths of an impoverished urban world. His early, naturalistic style evolved into an inventive, often surreal idiom that blurs reality and fantasy. His first novel, The Natural, is a strikingly original foray into sports fiction, and it remains one of the greatest, most profound, and most beloved baseball novels ever written. In The Assistant, Malamud created a searing drama about a struggling grocer’s family and a mysterious young man who comes to work at the store, transforming their lives in unfore seen ways. Twenty-six short stories range from the early tale “Armistice,” set in Brooklyn during the troubling weeks of the German invasion of France in 1940, to one of Malamud’s most celebrated stories, “The Magic Barrel,” about a rabbinical student and the matchmaker who leads him to an utterly unexpected bride..

Novels and Stories of the 1960s
Fusing modernist daring with traditional storytelling in a profoundly original and distinctive literary style, Bernard Malamud was one of postwar America’s essential voices. This volume collects three novels of the 1960s. In A New Life, set in the Pacific Northwest, native New Yorker Seymour Levin finds himself confronted not only with a new landscape but with erotic intrigue, university politics, and an appointment that isn’t quite what he’d expected it to be. The Fixer is the gripping saga of a Jew imprisoned in prerevolutionary Russia after being falsely accused of murdering a twelve-year-old boy. The episodic novel-in-stories Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition follows the comic misadventures, sexual and otherwise, of a failed American painter in Italy. Ten unforgettable stories round out this collection, in which Malamud shows himself the heir to Hawthorne, Chekhov, and Kafka, and at his best—as in “Idiots First,” “The Jewbird,” “The German Refugee”—their equal.

Novels and Stories of the 1970s & 80s
This capstone volume in Library of America’s Bernard Malamud edition brings together his three final novels: The Tenants, about the growing tensions between two male writers—one Jewish, the other Black—who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house; Dubin’s Lives, a revealing study in the perils and promise of love in middle age thought to be Malamud’s most autobiographical work; and God’s Grace, a postapocalyptic tale of upended evolution in which redemption depends on the lone human survivor’s ability to find common ground with a talking chimp. Edited by Malamud’s definitive biographer, the volume is rounded out with thirteen masterful short stories and the memoir “Long Work, Short Life” as well as a fasci nating autobiographical sketch, “A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,” published here for the first time.
Table of Contents

The Natural

The Assistant
A Note to My Norwegian Readers on The Assistant

Twenty Stories
Benefit Performance
The Place Is Different Now
Steady Customer
The Literary Life of Laban Goldman
The Cost of Living
The Prison
The First Seven Years
The Death of Me
The Bill
An Apology
The Loan
The Girl of My Dreams
The Magic Barrel
The Mourners
Angel Levine
A Summer’s Reading
Take Pity
The Lady of the Lake
Behold the Key
The Maid’s Shoes

Posthumously Published Stories
Armistice
Spring Rain
The Grocery Store
A Confession of Murder (first chapter of an abandoned novel)
Riding Pants
The Elevator

A New Life

The Fixer
Source of The Fixer

Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition
Last Mohican
Still Life
Naked Nude
A Pimp’s Revenge
Pictures of the Artist
Glass Blower of Venice

Ten Stories
Idiots First
Suppose a Wedding (A Scene of a Play)
The Jewbird
Life Is Better than Death
Black Is My Favorite Color
The German Refugee
A Choice of Profession
Man in the Drawer
My Son the Murderer
An Exorcism

The Tenants

Dubin’s Lives

God’s Grace

Thirteen Stories
God’s Wrath
Talking Horse
The Letter
The Silver Crown
Notes from a Lady at a Dinner Party
In Retirement
Rembrandt’s Hat
A Wig
The Model
A Lost Grave
Zora’s Noise
In Kew Gardens
Alma Redeemed

Other Writings
Introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud
Long Work, Short Life
A Lost Bar-Mitzvah

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2538 pages

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